The 54 minute video Nummer Veertien, Home by Guido Van Der Werve shows to advantage as the only work in the cavernous architecture of M Woods, a 2500 sq. m. former munitions factory in Beijing’s 798 District. Solemn choral music laced with explosions fills the space, accompanying the video of the artist delivering a chalice to Chopin’s burial grounds. The dirt it holds is from Poland, a full 1703.85 KM triathlon (completed by the artist) away from the graveyard.
The cinematic 4k clarity and the self-composed requiem is by turns ironic and romantic. The strange sublimity of Nummer Veertien, Home draws the viewer from the wooden bench where they perch deep into the projection. The ambition of the journey, the grandeur of the geography, and the fatigue of human life left me speechless—in spite of which, I found the words to sit down with the artist and talk to him. Over salad at a nearby cafe—he’s vegetarian, by the way—we talked about his home, his music, the Gesamtkunstwerk and explosions.
Guido van der Werve. Nummer veertien, home. 2012. 4K video, 54 min 9 sec. Courtesy M WOODS Collection.
Guido van der Werve. Nummer veertien, home. 2012. 4K video, 54 min 9 sec. Courtesy M WOODS Collection.
Richard Kuan: Can we start with talking first about the video Home? When did you get the original idea and conception for this video?
Guido van der Werve: It was a long process, actually. I found myself doing more and more sports, and less art in a way, and my art and life have always been mixed. I then got invited to do a show in PS1 in New York, and they wanted me to show some new work. I haven’t made new work in a while, but I decided to do a little talk about my work and about running as well. One of my favorite composers, Rachmaninoff, is actually buried in upstate New York, about 55 km from P.S.1. So at the end of the talk I left and ran upstate to his grave. That was one of the first “sketches” in a way, to try to get sports into the arts, because it is a strange mixture.
Then I made a few other works, which were also sketch works; I wanted to know if people got anything out of these “sport works” because its not a very common approach. I also didn’t want people to have the idea that the artist just has a new hobby… That year, maybe 2010, I started to think more and more about sports as the main element in the work. Around that time, I had lived in Amsterdam for two years. Then I moved to New York for two years, and then I moved to Finland, and then I moved to Berlin, and I turned 35. It is maybe the age when you start to look back a little bit, because we live pretty long, but still, I kind of started to have the need to make a more autobiographical work. Home would be a good title.
First I’d write some kind of autobiography as a script. So I sat down and sought to write, but I really didn’t get anywhere. I then thought I should create some kind of natural experience where your mind is in a more reflective mode. I have always been a little intrigued by mountaineering, and I knew that when you climb Mount Everest you actually have to sit in the base camp first for about a month, so that would be the perfect time to write your autobiography, because you are bored and you have nothing to do, waiting to go to the top of Mount Everest! I got in touch with a crew but they asked me if I had any previous mountaineering experiences… I said I didn’t: I am fit, but I am from Holland. There are no mountains there; it is very flat. They told me maybe to try another mountain first and advised me to climb Mount Aconcagua in Argentina, which is also quite high as well, almost 7000 meters. But unlike Mount Everest, it is an easier climb, you basically walk. Going there first, you can see how your body relates to the lack of air, because everybody relates to it in his or her own way.
So I went to the top of that mountain and it took about 2 weeks and it was one of the worst experiences of my life. It was very hard, but I found the whole endeavor to be quite…stupid. You just go to the top of a mountain, and when we finally got to the top I was just completely exhausted and we just sat there and it was a bunch of guys trying to have a meaningful moment but I just felt it was one of the dumbest things I ever done in my life. So then I decided not to go to the top of Mount Everest anymore. But I still had the problem: how to get this “kind-of” autobiographical work going? I decided to create a cultural near-death experience, which is writing a requiem. And that became the core of the film.
I started to write the music and then I wrote it in three movements, so I knew the film would also have this triptych structure. At that time I got a little bit bored of running, so I started to do triathlons. I realized that triathlons were also three “movements”: you have swimming, biking and running. It made a lot of sense to get those two elements together. Two of my childhood idols, Chopin and Alexander the Great, I’d always looked for an excuse to get them in the film somehow.
RK: Can I just ask you why they are your idols?
GW: I don’t know. I mean I grew up playing piano, so Chopin is, you know… And I’ve always been interested in Ancient Greek history. After high school I went to the conservatory first, but then I dropped out after two months and studied classical archeology for two years with the idea that I would become an Ancient Greek scholar. Yeah, that didn’t happen. They both left their homes when they were 19 and never went back. They also died very young.
I don’t know if you know Chopin’s history, but he was born in Poland: his father was French, his mother was from there, and he left Poland when he was nineteen and moved to Paris. He always wanted to go back to Poland but couldn’t go back because of the war. He lived in Paris for nineteen years. When he died, he knew that his body was going to be buried in the famous cemetery Père Lachaise in Paris. But he secretly asked his sister to have his heart cut out and bring it back to Warsaw. And having done this distance from P.S. 1 to Rachmaninoff’s grave, I realized I could do the distance from Warsaw to Paris via triathlon.
RK: So did you first write the music, or write the three parts of the script?
GW: It all kind of happened at the same time. It is a very nice way of working because when you write music, it’s quite abstract, and quite subconscious in a way, and many times when you make scripts or art, some of the thought process is more verbal in a sense. When writing music you work more with moods. That also really helps you keep the film, or the ideas for the film at this more pure, abstract thought-level. So I think after a year I had all these ingredients for this film which actually didn’t make a whole lot of sense. I had a very long requiem, Alexander the Great, Chopin, and parts of my own autobiography. It is hard to put it in words but I knew that it made sense. So then we started to shoot the film and we shot it for half a year.
RK: You don’t use any conversation or dialogue in your film. Rather, you use subtitles.
GW: Well I wouldn’t like to write something and give it to somebody. I just think thats a little weird. Giving someone music to play is more real. Giving an actor a script doesn’t make sense to me.
Early on in art school I started doing performances, but I hated two things about them: I hated that you had to do them live, but I also hated that you had to do them again and again. So I decided to film them. You only had to do them once, and you didn’t have to do them live. And that is really at the heart of the work. I mean those early pieces were really “sketchy” but I missed the direct, emotional link that music has. People laugh and cry in cinema, people laugh and cry when they listen to music, but in the visual arts it is usually a little bit more difficult.
The earlier films were just one action basically. Then my work started to become increasingly cinematic. But I never wanted to become a filmmaker, because I would feel like the actors are liars? It just doesn’t click. I mean you see a guy and you know his real name but then people call him by another name, and it just doesn’t land. So I wanted to make films but I didn’t want to work with actors, so I was looking for ways where people expressed themselves more honestly. I work with performances or I work with musicians or I work with dancers.
For this work Home I actually realized that sports is also honest, especially when you do long endurance. So then I thought maybe I can use sports expression as you would use acting to create some kind of tension, because its hard to come up with a long narrative when you don’t work with actors. You can only go so far. When you make a longer film you need a little bit of tension and structure. I think the sports helped.
I also think that in the film itself, by the way that I am running in the certain movement or the way that I look when I get to the end, I think you can sense that it is real. Of course, people, with film, are used to everything being staged. But I think when you make everything real, you can still sense it by little things, that fact that you get very stiff, for example.
RK: This somehow relates to the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which was brought up in some earlier interviews as well. Do you see your artistic trajectory getting closer and closer to fulfilling that concept?
GW: I think its nice, but I’m not sure anymore. I started to write my music. I mean in the beginning I was using other people’s music, but in 2007 I started to write for the first time. I think since that time I really enjoyed having the full control. Now it might be a little bit limiting also. It might be also interesting to have other people collaborate. I actually went to see another Wagner opera last week. He was the first to talk about the Gesamtkunstwerk. But I also think its not such a bad idea to open it up a little bit, because I think once you have full control maybe its also good to let it go.
The funny thing is my father and brother are both painters, and I grew up playing music. I kind of accidentally ended up in art school. I was just really bad at painting, I just couldn’t do it. After I did a whole bunch of different things I had no idea what to do anymore after, nothing really interested me too much, then I actually applied to art school with an idea to become an industrial designer. This whole thing just happened basically. I have some friends who wanted to become artists since they were four years old, you know? But for me it was a very free medium where I can do anything I want basically. I think it is one of the richest mediums in art, because you have the audio and the visual, and you can do anything with it.
Guido van der Werve. Nummer veertien, home. 2012. 4K video, 54 min 9 sec. Courtesy M WOODS Collection.
Guido van der Werve. Nummer veertien, home. 2012. 4K video, 54 min 9 sec. Courtesy M WOODS Collection.
RK: You touched on liking to make films, but you wouldn’t consider yourself a filmmaker.
GW: Yeah, I mean sometimes the lines are blurred. Some of the art films are shown at film festivals, some film festivals show a lot of art films as well. Some of the big museums are showing feature films. Its not always so easy to say what is what I think.
RK: Are there filmmakers that you enjoy?
GW: There are, some, yeah. There are a lot of great filmmakers. Well I really liked Songs from the Second Floor by Roy Andersson, the Swedish filmmaker. I mean I love Lars von Trier. David Lynch, of course.
RK: A lot of people have spoken to you previously about the idea of landscape. Throughout the video, you were facing away from the camera. Or, you were just a small speck in the landscape. How would you describe your use of landscape and how it has changed throughout the course of the shooting, and did it change during the time you were biking, swimming and running through it?
GW: I mean we usually talked about the routes in the evening, and then we looked at the shots we shot the day before. Sometimes we had some wide forest shots, so now it would be time to have a town or a bridge. I have been working with the same group for 10 years, so I can basically send them ahead and tell them if they see anything to shoot it and I will just pass by. When you travel, you are usually on trains or planes most of the time. Just by taking smaller roads (you can’t take bikes on highways) we were actually stunned by how beautiful some places were. I work very personally, and the a lot of the inspiration from the work is derived from my own state of mind. But I really want to make it open, and universal, which is a reason why I like to present myself as a “speck”, a blank figure basically, so its easier for people to see themselves in the landscape.
RK: You seem to work with a lot of dichotomies: the music is abstract, but the cinema plays with more concrete symbols and verbal concepts. The epic clashes with the personal. There’s you, and there’s Alexander the Great. What would you say are the most typical—at least currently—tensions you think about in constructing your work?
GW: With me, there is a strange mix of silliness and seriousness. I think when it goes toward either extreme, the work wouldn’t work. In the middle, you get an interesting tension. And now I’ve been working on a new work, about the mind rather than the body. I have been working, working, on it for two years and its a hard thing to grasp currently. (Laughs.) Since the music for Home was in 12 minor keys, this new film will be in 12 major keys. I think it will be the same length, though at the moment I’ve already rewritten the whole thing many times.
I really started to study the mind from a more scientific point of view. I didn’t know how to turn that verbal research into visual works. One morning about a month ago, I thought maybe I should write a book, and then in 6 days I wrote a whole book. I don’t know if it’s bad. I just wrote and wrote and wrote.
Dutch is extremely sarcastic, so you almost can’t say anything serious. Therefore I wrote this in English. Maybe also for me, English is more of a filter. It is farther away from me; somehow it is easier to look at myself truly in English. Dutch is too close. I’m not a native english speaker of course. Maybe I will rewrite it in Dutch, or maybe someone will have to edit it for me afterwards.
RK: What was the significance of the year 1988 in the film?
GW: There are some very early childhood memories that I still have, and I felt like there is still a reason why I still know them, so I reenacted them in a way. So 1988 I actually did make a bomb, and I brought it to school, and it exploded in my face. I almost got kicked out of school. But it wasn’t bad, I just blew off my eyelashes and my eyebrows.
RK: So, have you been making explosives for a while?
GW: Yeah, I also built a rocket once. For the piece The Clouds Are More Beautiful From Above.
RK: Even since high school?
GW: I’ve always liked to blow stuff up. (Laughs.)
Nummer Veertien, Home by Guido Van Der Werve will be on view until June 20th at M Woods Museum in Beijing, China.
M Woods was founded in 2014 by curator and gallerist Wanwan Lei and collector Lin Han as a museum to collect and cultivate contemporary art for a growing viewership in China. Their first show consisted of the museum’s permanent collection which comprised of works from contemporary artists around the world such as Kader Attia, Tracey Emin, Charles Harlan, Motohiko Odani, Sarah Peoples, as well as works from artists working in China such as Luis Chan, Chen Fei, Duan Jianyu, He Xiangyu, Firenze Lai, Xu Zhen, Yang Fudong and Zeng Fanzhi. In conjunction with their exhibitions, M Woods also includes artist residencies, lectures and panel discussions in their programming.
Guido van der Werve. Nummer veertien, home. 2012. 4K video, 54 min 9 sec. Courtesy M WOODS Collection.
Guido van der Werve. Nummer veertien, home. 2012. 4K video, 54 min 9 sec. Courtesy M WOODS Collection.
